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Onymous Hero writes "With the printing and distribution of pornography already banned in Iceland, further measures to stop internet porn are being considered by Iceland's Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson. From the article: "Iceland is taking a very progressive approach that no other democratic country has tried," said Professor Gail Dines, an expert on pornography and speaker at a recent conference at Reykjavik University. "It is looking a pornography from a new position — from the perspective of the harm it does to the women who appear in it and as a violation of their civil rights.""

The women who work in porn are there of the own free will and many of them make a decent living from it. Same with strippers. The only victims in a strip club are the guys blowing their paychecks to see a naked woman.

I don't think Icelanders are any more or less sexually moral than any one else. There are indeed abuses of women in porn, and the sex worker trafficing problem is huge.

However, this is a moralist in disguise. He doesn't mention as an example, gay/lesbian porn. He's thinly disguising is contempt for porn in general. Consenting partners, unencumbered and free to make the choice, make porn all of the time. He's just interested in making sure no one watches it, for his sense of moral satisfaction.

Performing in porn is free expression, and banning that expression is an infringement on the civil rights of the participants. The only "harm" resulting from porn is not from the porn itself, but from a society that is reactionary and overly judgmental. This is total bullshit to call this "progressive".

It isn't like anyone is holding a gun to any of these women to disrobe, or have sex on screen (they have to sign papers about age and all this anyway)...how could it possibly be in any way, an imposition on their civil rights??!!?

Is freedom of choice what to do with yourself not a civil right? What about that?

They're not banning porn in the name of "old-world belief systems", they're banning it in the name of feminism. I suppose since it's located in Iceland you can consider it to be old-world simply by location, but it's not based on the kind of religious attitudes one normally means by that term. And there's no evidence that he or his supporters aren't sincere about banning porn on feminist grounds rather than religious ones. Iceland is also a very secular country overall, despite having a state church.

"Progressive" now means that we'll tell you how to think and what to think.

It's great, I mean - look at all the burden that's taken off the individual!

(On a serious note relevant to the OP: (http://newsroom.unl.edu/blog/?p=1202) "The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on "global" cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of "local" cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts." This was happening with both male and female survey subjects.

Art and freedom of expression are at risk here. This law is no different than the Taliban imposing extreme sharia law on their hapless victims, it is one small group determining everyone else's choices.

To play at Devil's Advocate here: some women may be in porn against their will, "forced" into it either through unlawful restraint, or "economic difficulty", and therefore need to be "protected" from such a fate.

Now, if unlawfully restrained, clearly a crime has been comitted, and should be prosecuted. I can't see prohibition of pornography as having much effect on such crimes, sadly, as a black market will always exist, and indeed, increase the profit motive for such criminals. Arguably, it would make things worse.

The "economic difficulty" argument is hardly "force", and while it may be sad that a woman might have to resort to pornography, or prostitution, to support herself, clearly it speaks more to the failure of a social safety net, than any "economic force" used "against" her. Personally, I have more respect for prostitutes, porn actresses, and strippers, than those on the welfare dole: the former earn a quite difficult living (often abused in places where these activities are illegal).

All that said, I've known a number of women who stripped their way through college, to wind up with a decent education, and successfull careers. (Granted, a large percentage had serious drug habits, but that should not reflect on those that didn't and saw an easy way to separate men from their money for their benefit.)

The bottom line is this: just because some may be criminally or economically forced into activites they'd rather not do, this does not justify prohibiting those who willingly chose to engage in them from doing so.

To play at Devil's Advocate here: some women may be in porn against their will, "forced" into it either through unlawful restraint, or "economic difficulty", and therefore need to be "protected" from such a fate.

How is that any different fro men being "forced" to be a coal miner out of "economic difficulty"? By that argument shouldn't Iceland ban any potentially dangerous or unpleasant job?

No-no-no! You just dont get it do you? It is banned! BANNED you hear!?!The moment something is banned it just stops being there. Every politician knows that. They know that because the tried that with TPB, childpr0n, marijuana, alcohol, shrooms, speeding, burglary, copyright 'violations' and spam! This all worked brilliantly every, single, time!No politician can get marijuana, SO you are not capable either...

For example (a bit off, but here we go), the EU hires people (professional troll's) to make positive comments on the EU on fora that are 'critical' about that institution. So, if you just swamp a forum with 'happy-shiny-OMGponies-reactions' it just means that everyone in the EU is happy with the EU!

Basically one could say that the Vogons are the civil servants, and the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal the politicians. You see, politicians are so mind-bogglingly stupid that it assumes that if someone cannot see pr0n, then it simply is not there.

For the women who didn't make the career choice to go into the adult industry, ie, those who have been kidnapped/trafficked and forced to appear in films, they have bigger issues than the harm to their "civil rights" stemming from the film. Kidnapping and rape are, I assume, already illegal in Iceland. Filming it is then just creating documented evidence of that crime. Making ALL porn illegal because SOME porn is documentation of a REAL crime makes about as much sense as making guns illegal because criminal commit crimes with guns. Of course, Iceland's probably already done that too.

Also, not all porn is photographic. There's a huge art industry in porn that stands to be affected by any attempt to ban it. Is a free society really going to tell artists what they can and cannot draw?

I don't think Icelanders are any more or less sexually moral than any one else.

I'd argue that the banning of pornography and stripping makes Iceland significantly less sexually moral than other countries. Prudery is not moral. Freedom, and respecting the rights of people who use that freedom even if you don't like it, That's what real morality looks like.

Speech is political or social commentary, which is what actually needs to be protected. If porn gets banned, we don't lose anything that will improve our society.

Sure we do -- we lose the right to do things without someone else deciding that it's morally wrong and forcing us not to do it.

Even more, it prevents us from having a community with standards. When porn is common, everyone gets desensitized to porn and lets it shape their worldview.

Ah, but whose standards? Are you suggesting your standards are so awesome the rest of us should be legally required to adhere to them? Because anybody who suggests something is half way to becoming the problem as they'll want to make it illegal to do anything they disagree with.

In the name of freedom of speech, expression, etc. we have permitted ourselves to become crass and to support outright destructive ideas

Humans have been crass and supportive of outright destructive ideas for millenia. And humans are a diverse group who believe all sorts of stupid shit, believing otherwise is stupid.

And people tend to define "outright destructive ideas" as anything they don't agree with.

The best you can do in society is to try to balance the needs and wants of everybody -- not take one group and make what they think is Divine Immutable Truth and make everybody else follow it.

Who do we pick? The loudest? The most numerous? The ones who have always been in power? The first born male child?

Little old ladies who think a skirt should never be above the knee, people who believe a woman's face should be covered, or that dancing is the work of the devil -- those people are all entitled to their beliefs, but that doesn't confer any obligation on me to adhere to their beliefs. No more than anything that I choose to do that they disagree with confers any obligation on them.

The only obligation here is to shut the fuck up and mind your own business. Freedom of speech says "you can disagree, but you can't stop it" -- and quite frankly, it's a far better situation than a bunch of fanatics trying to make it law that the rest of us live up to what they believe.

I'm not going to adhere to your beliefs just because you want to, and I'm not going to listen to anything you say that says "god told me we can't do this"... and at that point, you hold your tongue, and I'll hold mine. But if you think your beliefs gives you the right to tell me what I can and can't do -- then your beliefs are shit.

If porn gets banned, we don't lose anything that will improve our society.

We lose the porn. I like porn, and losing porn would make this society worse for me. Just because *you* don't value porn doesn't make it worthless. This is why we have freedom, because people have different values.

In the name of freedom of speech, expression, etc. we have permitted ourselves to become crass and to support outright destructive ideas, and in fact force them on others

Yes, destructive ideas like censorship are being force on Icelanders. This is a serious problem. Far more serious than porn.

Assuming and anti-internet-porn law would be legal and in practical terms enforceable, it's the government's job to weigh the harm being done by the status quo against the harm done by increased regulations, and to take into account the will of the people in the process. Not an easy job.

It's a very easy job. There is no evidence of harm being done by the status quo.

In my home country, we've legalized weed. And for many years, there were fewer junkies and drug-related crimes in the Netherlands than in surrounding countries. Then we introduced a measure that wouldn't even make it illegal, it's more like a membership required to smoke dope. That spurred crime alright... Within no-time we had street sellers occupying the corners of every street in towns that previously didn't have this issue.

So they reverted to the old system. And the peace returned.

The same goes for prostitution. In Sweden, they're on a moral high horse about prostitution, but there you get Eastern European and Russian girls that are forcibly kept in dodgy apartments as a default, while only a percentage of prostitutes in the Netherlands are actually forced into the business.

My point is that bad stuff will always happen to good people, but draconian measures, prohibition and even harsh punishment have all been proven to exacerbate whatever problem they're aimed at. Time and time again.

As a result I would argue that a ban on porn is just plain obtuse. It is a limitation on the right to free speech and congregation for those that are consenting afficionado's of filmed exhibitionism, it derives all manner of people of a way to release sexual tension and it's just not effective.

I do wonder what would happen to the rape and violent crime statistisc in a society if they went overboard in sexual conservativism.

So something forced you to post those words? Fate, karma, predestination?

The laws of physics. There's no free will term in f=ma.

That whole "there is no free will" philosophy was dreamed up by people who refuse to be responsible for their own actions.

What makes you think I'm claiming I'm not responsible for my own actions? Holding people accountable when they hurt others has an observable positive effect on society. Whether we have free will or not is entirely irrelevant.

Fair enough, but you can have a much longer career as an engineer than as a stripper.

Considering a girl I used to date back in the early 2000's was clearing upwards of $4500 to 6800/week? I don't think that's a problem. She hasn't worked in 3 years now, and it living off the investments she had done when she was younger. Retiring at 32 must have been a poor career move for her.

Perhaps more to the point, banning all porn makes it more difficult to deal with kidnapping, trafficking, exploitation, rape, etc. As long as porn is legal, it's much easier to monitor and track. Make it illegal, and there will still be porn out there, but now it's more difficult to determine which bits of porn are clearly harmful to the actors/actresses in the film.

This is basically the same argument I'd make for making prostitution and recreational drugs legal. No government has any business legislating personal morality: we should, instead, regulate these things to help moderate the harm to others these practices cause.

Yeah! Or like making all nuclear bombs illegal even though not everyone would blow up cities with them.

My point: it's a balance. We decide issues based on the amount of harm, and the use of the tool. Nuclear bombs are a trite but obvious example of a tool where even the minority use of the tool warrants its universal ban. Guns are somewhere in the middle. Poisons are somewhere in the middle, different for different poisons.

Porn, on the other hand, is nowhere near the balancing point: to me it is totally obvious that porn is overwhelmingly good in almost every way, with only a tiny amount of harm. There is no reasonable argument for banning porn because the bad does not come anywhere close to outweighing the good.

But, to say that any modicum of positive use for a tool means the tool should not be banned, is the kind of childish black-and-white thinking that would put nuclear bombs into the hands of prison inmates (after all, what part of "shall not be infringed" don't you understand, right?) Use subtle thought and moderation. They will take you far.

There's a huge difference between having sex (or even just appearing naked in front of people) and cleaning a toilet, to a lot of people.

Indeed. There are plenty of people who find the idea of cleaning up someone else's shit an unthinkable career choice, whereas being naked or having public sex isn't as big a deal to them as it appears to be to you. That said, lets assume that it's easier to make money by gettin' nekkid for the camera than it is to get a janitorial job. You've now implied that they took this option because all the "good" jobs like maid or McDonald's fry-o-lator operator are out of reach for them, so if you take away this job option, what are the people who rely on doing it going to do instead? Or is it a case of letting them die before letting them "dishonor" themselves?

You know, Marcello, you make a good point. Pornography really hasn't served to make us open-minded about sexuality.

In fact, if you look at the states in the US that consume the most pornography, they are among the most repressed and repressive areas. Areas where sex education is anathema and teenagers are taught "abstinence" but have the highest rates of out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Places where a teacher aren't allowed to say the word "gay" or "vagina" but where gay kids commit suicide and women are forced to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasounds if they want an abortion.

Places where clergymen preach against the evils of pornography, and there is educational outreach about the "dangers of porn addiction" but the rate of pornography consumption is highest.

Sorry, but cleaning toilets doesn't involve having pictures/videos of you doing acts you'd rather keep private, with people you'd rather not do them with, around.

Your are assuming that your values are everyone else's values. You should stop doing that. You should in particular not act on that.

Some of us consider sex to be neither need be private, or in any way shameful in such a circumstance. We don't force this idea on you -- if you aren't comfortable with it, then do not participate either in the making or the consumption of any public performance. It's entirely your choice.

It's different because if you have a job that pays you a very generous amount and requires close to no intelligence at all to do, you are far less likely to manage your finances well.

I've known people with PhDs who have declared bankruptcy -- the amount of intelligence required to do your job and your financial acumen are not directly correlated.

I'm just saying, if you take someone with no clue how to handle money, give them a way to make large amounts of it in a short period of time after which they will no longer be able to make that money, the results will be less than stellar.

Yeah? How many of those people who had.com era salaries find themselves in the same boat?

Seriously, what are you arguing for? We should outlaw porn because some people will make money in the industry, spend it all, and then not have any? As I said, that is true for every other job on the planet, and it isn't unique to porn.

Well, that's the nice thing about being a conservative: details like there being six unemployed people for every open job need not enter your storyline. Or McJob wages not coming close to making rent, much less rent + student loan payments.

There are jobs out there...just maybe some that people think are beneath them.

If no jobs in your area, perhaps move to a new area?

Sorry, I don't buy it...things are tough, sure, but there ARE always legal ways to make money. Hell, I see hordes of Mexicans standing in front of the Lowe's or Home Depot and get picked up for manual labor. I'm sure there are other tough jobs that will earn money for someone with poor to little education. Heck, get on with a crew that mows lawns all day, etc.

It has nothing to do with conservative/progressive. All anyone needs is the willingness to work and tough it for awhile, but you can work and earn in ways that don't require you to take your clothes off.

I'm not saying pr0n or stripping isn't a viable method of income, but the OP was that this was a last resort and that often nothing else could be found.

And I do see people out there working 2x jobs if one doesn't pay the rent fully.

I wonder if you would whistle the same tune if you're stuck in traffic next to some car that blares music you hate...

I have no expectation that the public space (or anyone else's private space) will be tailored to my liking. The only place I expect things to go my way is inside my home, and to a much more limited extent, within the borders of land I own. If someone wants to make a lot of noise, paint their house like a Dr. Suess story, board up all their windows, or swim butt-ugly naked in the town center fountain, I wish them well. Men can wear skirts and women can wear pants, anyone can marry anyone else or not, and the "acceptable" number of tattoos and piercings, no matter how unlikely or crude, shall be unlimited. I don't agree that it is legitimate that people have the right to regulate anyone else's actions in the public space, unless those actions actually cause direct physical harm or direct financial injury to a non-consenting party.

In any event, just because one person's values don't mix well with your own doesn't mean they're in the wrong, obviously, but when in doubt, it's best to do what's best for the populace.

No. When in doubt, it's best to do nothing and let individuals decide for themselves.

It's an equivalent argument for smoking marry-j. So many people advocate for its legalization, but yet, you can't honestly tell me that legalizing it would really lead to a better world... It's bogus.

I absolutely can tell you it would lead to a better world. The arguments are many and extremely well founded, from reduction in harm done by evil legislation (such as huge jail sentences, ruined families, lost opportunities), to tax revenues, to personal liberty issues, to healthcare issues such as appetite enhancement, to elimination of it as a viable income source for gangs and cartels, to replacement for alcohol as a much, much safer intoxicant.

Same with porn. It's nothing but trash.

You are entitled to your opinion. You are not entitled to my opinion.

Sometimes the best thing to do in life is the most difficult... In this case, I'm all for making online porn illegal because I know it's nothing but 100% trash.

You know nothing of the sort. You have an opinion you want to inflict on everyone else. For my part, I absolutely support your choice to not engage with porn on any or all levels. But that's where your liberties end and the liberties of others begin.

A big difference between porn and cleaning toilets is the lasting efffects. I know of porn stars who later committed suicide

Ah yes, because we all know, people that clean toilets never commit suicide, and certainly not because they regretted the choices they made in life that led them to cleaning toilets.
If we, as a culture (yes I'm talking about the repressed conservative US citizens) did not view human sexuality as shameful, maybe there would be a lot less issue with suicide among adult film stars. What is it they say here on slashdot? Correlation does not equal causation.

I like the idea someone suggested above. Don't enforce copyright on porn. If people want to do it as a hobby then fine, but remove the profit motive.

Can we do this for everything that some sub culture finds objectionable, like Rock Music, Scientific Research, Harry Potter, etc.? Seriously just because you don't like it does not mean that it should be treated any different than any other form of art you don't personally like. Though I would bet that you only want it to be free so you can stop paying for it.